Algae Biofuel Companies

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Canada Consortium, Hybrid System

Here are a couple of articles about Canada’s I-CAN consortium and one of their projects, the Carbon Algae Recycling System. The first article was a footnote in Sapphire Energy’s opening remarks for the recent Senate hearing.

The initial goal here was to find a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and now they’ve been at work for about a year and half on the algae project trying to figure out what kind of algae-growing system will work in Canada’s climate. They couldn’t use an open pond system because of the cold weather, and I guess they rejected the bioreactors they looked at. Their plans now call for a hybrid pond/bioreactor system whose main component is a covered pond which is 90 cm deep instead of 30 cm. This extra depth is in order to take up less space.

So because the ponds are both covered and unusually deep, they need a lighting system, and it will be interesting to see what they come up with. (I wonder if they evaluated Bionavitas Light Immersion Technology before they start re-inventing the wheel. It seems that a lot of these groups keep starting from scratch on everything.) The schematic from the CARS website shows solar collectors on top of the pond, but I don't know if that is current.

It sounds like they are just to the point of starting to build the first prototype so they have a long way to go.

Re Bionavitas lighting technology, msg#240: http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=35843574

WEBSITES

Carbon Algae Recyling System
http://www.i-can.ca/cars-project

I-CAN
http://www.i-can.ca/

ARTICLES

The first article is concise and gives the basic story. The second article rambles a bit but it has a few additional, useful details.

http://www.bioenergymagazine.ca/article-print.jsp?article_id=377

Researchers use microalgae to develop a carbon recycling system
By Online Reporter

Web exclusive posted April 23, 2009 at 12:03 p.m. EST

Research networks and technology organizations have collaborated efforts on a project aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by using microalgae to convert carbon dioxide into renewable fuels and bioproducts.

The Carbon Algae Recycling System project is designed by Innoventures Canada (I-CAN), a not-for-profit consortium of ten Canadian research corporations including the Alberta Research Council, Saskatchewan Research Council and Quebec’s Centre de Recherche Industrielle du Québec and Manitoba’s Industrial Technology Centre.

The objective of the project is to create a technically and economically-feasible algae conversion system suitable for Canadian weather conditions that can be integrated into large-final emitters such as power plants, refineries and other major carbon dioxide emitters. By providing an algae-based carbon management tool, I-CAN researchers can offer industries the opportunity to mitigate and convert carbon dioxied into value-added products such as biodiesel, ethanol and fertilizer.

The CARS project feeds low grade waste heat and industrial flue gas, directly into man-made ponds to heat and feed the growth of microalgae, which can be harvested and processed into biofuels and other bioproducts.

Stage one of the project, which was completed in 2008, focused on identifying the conditions in which algae strains thrived. Ninety-eight per cent of the world’s commercial algae facilities use an open pond system for producing algae, while the remaining 2 per cent use photobioreactors said Project Manager, Quinn Goretzky, “After looking at the option between open ponds and photobioreactors, we came up with a hybrid system,” added Cindy Jackson, lead engineer on the project.

CARS researchers are now developing a 90 centimeter-deep, in-ground, covered pond that is subject to an intense lighting system that is able to penetrate every layer of algae and capture approximately 233,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. While traditional ponds are 30 cm deep, the covered pond system helps maintain a consistent temperature and environment and is able to achieve greater results by optimizing light conditions, lowering capital costs and reducing its overall environmental footprint. CARS researchers will tests its concepts at a bench scale level and then will progressively scale up from a small pond to a large pilot pond as the project develops, Jackson said.

The ultimate direction of the project is to produce a demonstration facility that can grow algae commercially year-round and is integrated with a large emitter, Goretzky said. “[We hope our research] takes the traditional industry base in Canada, reduces its carbon footprint, maintains jobs and adds a whole new industry base that is carbon neutral and environmentally friendly,” he said.

The next stage of the study will involve the engineering and construction of a lab-scale demonstration facility at an industrial site. The project is anticipated to be complete in 2012.

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http://www.albertaoilmagazine.com/?p=784&year=2009

World’s oldest organism turns carbon into biofuel
by Bill Sass

Quinn Goretzky is a man who wants to NOx your SOx off. He’s project manager for Innoventures Canada’s Carbon Algae Recycling System (CARS), a project that aims not only to remove carbon dioxide from flue gases by feeding it to algae, but also to make money doing it.

And CO2 may not be the only candidate to turn into a generator of tidy profits. Other noxious substances – like NOx (nitrogen oxide) and SOx (sulfur oxide) – could put money into a corporate bank account.

Innoventures Canada (I-CAN) is a consortium of 10 provincial research agencies and institutes, including the Alberta Research Council. The national organization’s sole purpose is to find effective ways to commercialize new technologies by applying them cheaper, better and faster.

It can be a risky business, Goretzky says. There’s no guarantee an innovation will actually pan out – the idea of I-CAN is to spread the risk around.

The CARS project was conceived about 18 months ago. “The board that came together for I-CAN asked themselves, ‘What’s a big project that could be taken on? What’s something that we could demonstrate that we could do and also address a pretty pressing issue of the day?’”

A few years ago, as today, a pressing issue was climate change and its relationship to carbon dioxide emissions. Although using CO2 for enhanced oil recovery is one way to give emissions reductions an economic upside, that market is well known to be limited by both industry demand and prices available for materials used as life-extending injections into old wells. Simply capturing the greenhouse gas and locking it away in an underground vault “is almost a pure cost function,” Goretzky says.

“But what if we turned the question upside down? Can you make money off of CO2 beyond these formats? Could you do it in such a way to get positive returns off it?”

A proposal was put together and three I-CAN members came together – the Alberta Research Council, Centre de Recherche Industrielle du Quebec and the Saskatchewan Research Council – to determine if it was feasible to grow algae commercially in Canada while at the same time consuming large amounts of CO2.

The result was a conceptual model worth further investigation, Goretzky reports.

The Alberta government thinks the idea is worth pursuing as well. The minister of Advanced Education and Technology, Doug Horner, notes Alberta is the lead funder for the project and is watching it with great interest.

So far, between $200,000 and $250,000 of public funds have been invested. “Down the road, if we see there’s some good potential in this, we’re not averse to looking at second-round financing through the various funds that we have,” Horner says.

The CARS project is another exploration direction in dealing with excess CO2 projection, the minister says. “Carbon sequestration is one part, but there’s no one silver bullet for greenhouse gas management and this is another piece of the puzzle.”

The new idea packs plenty of potential appeal to environmentalists because it represents a step beyond the CCS theme of tacking equipment onto industrial operations. “It’s speeding up Mother Nature’s processes of soaking up CO2 from the air through plants and photosynthesis. It’s also about creating biofuel,” Horner says.

The CARS project is also about efficiency. Algae create about 50 times more ethanol and biodiesel per acre as a feedstock than some oilseeds or corn or soy beans, Horner estimates.

“You’re going to burn that and create more emissions, but, the thing is, it’s renewable. There are interesting things coming out of the woodwork and this is one of those interesting things,” the minister says.

He’ll get no argument about that from Goretzky. “We have a concept here that we have demonstrated could be economical under certain conditions. We think it’s compelling enough to warrant going on to the next stage.”

That next stage involves a lot of laboratory bench-scale work on building small systems and gradually scaling them up to the point where a demonstration project can be built within three years. Now, the real science and engineering production begins – and the star of the show are the humble algae, which are just about the oldest species of life on the planet

CARS researchers will look for “the best algae Mother Nature can produce” and that can thrive in Canadian climates, Goretzky says. There are tens of millions of algae strains. CARS narrowed the number down to 21 candidates and “fully characterized” a short list of five.

“I’d like to say we scratched the surface of that work, but in all honesty, we’re maybe reaching towards the doorbell in terms of what has to be done before we go into the big algae house.”
No matter what strains are finally used, they all have the same three basic components – fatty acids, carbohydrates and proteins. The fatty acids have gotten most of the press so far – that’s the stuff that can be turned into biodiesel and other fuels.

“In building the CARS system, we realized you couldn’t go with a single value-added product at the other end. We’ve conceptualized two or more products,” Goretzky says.

“If you’re just going after biodiesel and 45 per cent of that algae was fatty acids, you still have that other 55 per cent of that algae. You might be producing piles of biodiesel, but you have this growing pile of algae carcasses with parts missing – which has been one of the concerns we’ve gotten from industry. Clearly, you have to come at this from the perspective of multiple products.”

The carbohydrates can become ethanol and the proteins are generally converted into a fertilizer or into animal feed. A range of biochemicals and nutrients, known as nutriceuticals, have that potential, he says.

“It makes it very fascinating,” Goretzky says. “You have one of the world’s oldest organisms that have survived various environmental and climatic conditions and when you really work on it, you find there are all these potential benefits that can be derived from it.”

But there are challenges to be met before the money starts rolling in. They start with developing a pond system in which the algae can grow.

CARS is looking at a “covered pond” concept to compensate for the naturally cold Canadian climate. And the researchers want to make the pond smaller by digging it deeper.

“If you look at the footprint, based on the 2.3 million tonnes a year of CO2, in a pond 30 centimeters deep, which is what the traditional depth is for an open pond system, you’re talking about a pond that’s 1,200 hectares.” One hectare is an area the size of two Canadian Football League fields. “I don’t know that many people who want a pond that big in their neighborhood,” he says.

CARS wants to make the pond 90 centimeters deep, reducing the footprint to 400 hectares, and that means developing a lighting system that will promote algae growth beyond the 30 centimeters natural sunlight can penetrate. The 400 hectares is still pretty big, Goretzky says. “Obviously, we have to reduce the size of the footprint even more than that.”

Maintaining the optimum temperature in the pond may lead to another environmental plus. Besides unwanted gases, most large industries produce “low grade heat” that’s simply allowed to escape into the atmosphere. “If we could capture that heat and transfer it to our ponds, that could help us maintain a target temperature that could optimize the growth systems for our algae,” Goretzky says.

He also emphasizes that CARS is a recycling system, not a sequestration or disposal approach. “It extends the period of time it takes for that CO2 to be released. Rather than the CO2 going into the atmosphere, it goes into the algae. From the algae, it’s broken down and turned into something else. That something else, like biodiesel, at some point will be consumed by a vehicle and it will be released into the atmosphere.”

But using the algae means less use of non-renewable fossil fuel in some other area. “It’s more of a living system approach to industrial design, which finds a purpose for carbon and provides other benefits that come with it,” Goretzky says.

The CARS scheme also gets around the expense of collecting, pressurizing and transporting CO2 in a closed carbon capture system. The algae, or a collection of specific algae strains in a pond, can eat up the various flue gas components directly. And ponds could be built where the chimneys exist.

Commercialization of algae has been investigated since the 1930s. The last big research wave lasted from the late 1970s to the early ’90s, spurred by various “energy shocks.” Now, with computer advances, the work can be taken to new heights, particularly in relation to genetics. There is the potential in the near future to obtain a complete genetic map of algae and processors may be able to modify it to fit the flue gas.

“It’s very exciting,” Goretzky said. “You’re building something that changes the way the world looks at energy development.”